PETER GABRIEL
"Me and Peter always got on really well,” says Collins of his predecessor as Genesis singer, “so I kind of suggested myself when he was looking for a drummer. I’d just done the early demos for Face Value and I was going though a divorce so I needed something to occupy myself with.”
Their unlikely reunion, on Gabriel’s third self-titled album, would produce something even more unlikely: a drum sound that came to define the following decade. “Ah, the old gated reverb,” says Collins. “The sound that built the 80s. It was a pure accident.”
This unique beat – clipped, compressed, direct – made its bow on the album’s opening song, Intruder, one of five tracks he played on. According to Collins, he was playing regularly when his drum sound was picked up by the microphone that connected the recording space with the control room.
“Those mics weren’t made for recording music and apparently it came out sounding completely different,” he says. “Peter was in there and he said, ‘What’s that? I like it.’ And he went away and tinkered with it, and the next thing you know, he’s got this new… thing.”
Collins’ relationship with Gabriel remains friendly.
“We were never rivals,” he said. “I could never be the person he was when I started singing with Genesis.
It was hard enough being the person I was.”
Does he ever see a point where Genesis will reunite, in any form, in the future? “Well, you can never say never,” he says. “But there are no plans. We’ve all got our own things going on.”